URL Question and Advice on Site Architecture
-
Good morning one and all,
i have a specific question pertaining to my Domain Migration Website URL structure.
I have a computer repair business that I am re branding and my question at this point is centrally focused on how to best handle my URL naming structure that will best suite my needs for my the Search Engines and also my customers UX while not looking SPAMMY
I am a web developer and SEO and I am building a SILO Site Architecture in WordPress using Pages (not Posts) so no discussion is need on the Permalink structure.
I am attaching several Images below of Screen Shots of the new site that I have designed so that you may look at them and see the Silo Architecture Layout in action for the most part.
OK, here we go. Looking at the Silo Mast Head, we can see that the following Main Menu items each represent a specific Silo Theme
Silo Theme # 1 - COMPUTER REPAIR
Silo Theme # 2 - VIRUS REMOVAL
Silo Theme # 3 - PHONE REPAIR
Silo Theme # 4 - NETWORKING
Silo Theme # 5 - DATA RECOVERY
My specific question is, if /computer-repair/ is a main silo theme (WP -Parent Page) and /laptop-repair/ is a (Child Page) of Computer Repair is the following example below (the actual URL string) going to 'trigger' a SPAM signal to either the user or GOOGLE or both??
URL String:
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair/laptop-repair/
Here's another example with the VIRUS REMOVAL SILO
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/virus-removal/malware-removal/
Seeing how computer repair is the main silo theme that cannot be changed in the URL Structure (it can) but I wont change it seeing how COMPUTER REPAIR is the single largest keyword phrase used by individuals when they are looking for computer repair.
Secondly, - LAPTOP REPAIR is also a Keyword Phrase that that has HIGH search queries that I am trying to rank for and that too (ideally) should also not changed!
How do I deal with this situation? Or, am I seeing this in a overly paranoid way?
I currently have the site allowing only my IP Address so I am afraid that the screen shots below is all that I can do on this in lieu of actually visiting the Site
Currently, I have my URL Structure where Wilmington NC immediately follows the targeted keyword phrase for the Silo Theme like below
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/virus-removal-wilmington-nc/malware-removal/
The example above, - including the location after the keyword phrase does look much more attractive and breaks it up so it does not read SPAMMY and it will help with SEO but yet another problem exists using the location after the keyword phrase which I explain in detail Below.
On top of doing a complete re-branding Domain Change I am actually going to be relocating myself and my business to Charlotte, NC at the end of the summer so I have serious doubts if using Wilmington NC within the URL structure would be a wise idea considering that I will be relocating and an internal 301 Redirect on a Newly Migrated site 2-3 months after the initial site migration and site setup may have some negative impact and confuse Google and compound the situation thus much further despite the fact that it would immediately help me bounce back up with my rankings after the migration process.
Thoughts a suggestions on both explained scenarios please?
I have asked this specif question once already but obviously people do not read my very detailed and well thought out questions. This can also be viewed here>http://www.seomoz.org/q/need-very-urgent-advice-on-wedsite-migration-questions-please#reply_150847>
Thank you
Sincerely,
Marshall Thompson
SEOMOZ-PC-MEDICS-ON-CALL-1.jpg SEOMOZ-PC-MEDICS-ON-CALL1.jpg
-
Assuming I understand your specific questions correctly...
Having a /computer-repair/ directory with a /laptop-repair/ subdirectory should not cause you any problems in itself. However, if all of the content in /laptop-repair/* also appears in /computer-repair/* you could have a duplicate content problem to deal with. From your response to Thomas' extremely-detailed and helpful - though somewhat off-topic - comment I assume you already know that though.
I would not put the location in the directory, such as /virus-removal-wilmington-nc/. Whether or not you are moving makes no difference. I might make an exception there if you have multiple locations, but even then I think it would be a bad idea to have, for example:
/virus-removal-wilmington-nc/laptop-repair/
/virus-removal-charlotte-nc/laptop-repair/
...unless you had some very specific things to say about each location in regard to laptop repair that could not be expressed on the same page. These would be dangerously close to "doorway pages" which is common in any multi-location industry, and the bane of any SEO's existance when trying to clean up the penalties and filters that so often follow such a taxonomy.
Keep it simple. Having the location in the URL like that is a tiny, wee little factor that gets an inordinate amount of attention from SEOs, in my opinion. You are of course free to disagree with this, as you did when someone had a similar opinion in the other thread. In that case, let me answer your other question from that thread:
"If I include my current location (Wilmington NC) in the destination (New Domain) URL string for any given 301 redirect from my existing website to the new website and then physically move to another city 3 months later is this setting myself up for a BIG Failure? Seeing how I have no idea of how this technically works with GOOGLE as far as how long this (migration process) takes to Fully complete where the OLD domain completely drops off and everything is Fully passed over to the New Domain in terms leaving the 301 Re directs in place on the Old Domain Server. How long does this process usually take with GOOGLE?"
In my experience having done several dozen site migrations on sites of many different types and sizes, it should take Google no more than a few weeks to have their index completely updated for a site the size of yours. This is assuming that they are given the appropriate 301 response codes and are crawling the site regularly (i.e. no existing penalties or major algorithmic filters are in place that would limit crawling).
Switching your location like this is just one of several reasons I wouldn't put the location in the URL as proposed, so yes it is shooting yourself in the foot a little bit, but nothing that you won't be able to overcome. They will index the new URL, complete with the new location, and ranking calculations will be updated accordingly.
Regarding your other question toward the end of that thread, yes you can change the old htaccess file on the other server later, but there is no guarantee that Google will visit those old URLs again unless you have some external links pointing to them. If they came once, saw the redirect to the new URL, and there is no access to the old URL they may not see if you update the old URL's header response to point to a "new new" URL. If that makes sense. You could initiate the crawl by linking to the old URL from somewhere, such as a sitemap - but I'd advise making a "permanent" redirect permanent. In other words, I'd try to get it right the first time. Keeping the location out of that directory name would allow you to do that, unless I'm missing something.
Lastly, I disagree that domain.com/topic-in-charlotte-nc/sub-topic/ is "less" spammy than domain.com/topic/sub-topic/ but we all have a right to our opinions.
Good luck!
-
Thank you once again Thomas but I do understand S.E.O and the many variables involved in it already.
I am more on the lines of advanced level to be more precise, just not on the UBER Level advanced stage. Not discounting the solid recommendations that you gave but my question is specific to URL structure pertaining to my Silo Site Architecture that I designed and formulated through keyword research and knowing m industry, not on how to understand and learn SEO.
Can someone please look at my initial post and read it and give me feedback on my specifc questions?
-
Hi Marshall,
I have just posted in reply to your other question. And wanted to remind you of one thing the power of video when embedded correctly.
I forgot to tell you about this plug-in
http://yoast.com/wordpress/local-seo/
Because keywords for videos are few and far between compared to a website using text. You have a big advantage by using a video site map along with an advertising video or a instructional video you can give out a small amount of information for free to show people you know what you're doing, and they will remember you as a place that they found help for a problem.
I would recommend if you don't want to spend a lot of money using Box.net to make a screen cast video it will allow you to make a helpful video withjust your computer going through the steps of how to do something simple that people have issues with that you really no is not going to hurt your business by giving out This video as information.
in my opinion the best way to host a video on your website is with a company called Wistia
the reason being is they are the only company that takes care of building the Video site map for you. http://wistia.com/
they give you 3 videos for free life to get you started.
They are not the least expensive company, and if you find that your customers will either pay for video tutorials on how to fix things on their computer or you want to have a larger list of tutorials that you are using as advertisement to get new customers into your store.
There are much less expensive methods.
Using WordPress plug-ins you can use a less expensive video hosting.
I would personally stay away from using YouTube on your own website. While it works now I believe Google will change that very soon. If you use a business video hosting platform you will not have to worry about Google updates destroying your search in addition to this if you post on YouTube as well as your own site and it is the same movie YouTube in googles ranking every time because of its incredible page rank and authority.
Companies like Vzaar offer 250 videos at approximately $25 per month I know it is less if you buy the annual plan.
Viddler offers and an excellent platform and will give you unlimited videos at $50 a month.
And by far considered the most economical or bang for your buck
Vimeo Pro ( not regular Vimeo it must be Pro)
offers 50 GB and 250,000 plays for $199 a year this will take care of all your video needs and is considered by experts to be the most economical it comes with everything most of the other companies offer at $50 to $200 a month
now what's the catch why not start with these guys well you can and the only way any of these great video hosting companies will increase your rank in Google is with a plug-in my personal favorite and the only one I have tested aside from one free plug-in that was not my cup of tea. IS
Video SEO for WordPress
it costs $69 for life and is licensed for 1 website only you can purchase more at different rates if you want add more websites later this is the way you can start off with a plan like using VimeoPro and have it have the same effect as Wistia altogether you would save a great deal of money and rank extremely well for your videos.
Developed by Joost de Valk
If you refer to him everyone knows of them as "Yoast" and I encourage you to ask other people their opinions of his work. I believe him to be maybe the best WordPress plug-in developer for search engine optimization. I strongly encourage you to ask other SEOmoz members and people you trust to know about search engine optimization and WordPress their opinions of this great coder
http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/
One thing I would like you to know and to read is a blog on this subject from a company that I have faced tremendous amount of respect for these guys do Staples and Microsoft's search engine optimization they know what they're doing, and they're a fantastic company. Here is a link to the post regarding video seo
http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/
this is what you should definitely read if you are going to use Vimeo Pro
http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/#vimeo
Other fantastic plug-ins by Yoast
http://yoast.com/wordpress/#analytics
http://yoast.com/wordpress/#other
and
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Question about related topics
I know that in order to rank on any keyword I need to talk about different "concepts / topics " everyone has a different word for it but let say I need to talk about multiple subject to make it simple. My question is how to find those subjects ... in some industry it is pretty straight forward you go to related search or some keyword tool such as Moz and you find what you need. Example : If "Title tag" is my main topic the subtopic that I find and that I need to cover on the same page are "title tag length , title tag checker, mobile title tag, title tag example etc..." On my keywords such as " Alsace bike tours" all I find in related searches and using all the tools out there such as Moz keyword research explorer is "Alsace cycling vacations " ""Cycling Colmar" "Alsace bike trip " etc... not really anything exiting , it means the same thing and it is just variations of the keyword. I have used other tools such as Marketmuse and they give me related topic such as "Strasbourg" "Colmar" "half timbered houses" "Alsace wine" and I am not sure it is any better... because to cover those I have no other solution that doing definitions... or describe those in details which is probably not what someone typing "Alsace bike tour" is looking for. I have the feeling that all those tools are great for keywords like "content marketing" or "title tag" with a lot of requests but they fail for everything else. Can someone give me an insight on how they do to write on multiple topic where they are in my situation and based on the example I gave which topic they would cover and based on my example.. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
I need help on how best to do a complicated site migration. Replacing certain pages with all new content and tools, and keeping the same URL's. The rest just need to disappear safely. Somehow.
I'm completely rebranding a website but keeping the same domain. All content will be replaced and it will use a different theme and mostly new plugins. I've been building the new site as a different site in Dev mode on WPEngine. This means it currently has a made-up domain that needs to replace the current site. I know I need to somehow redirect the content from the old version of the site. But I'm never going to use that content again. (I could transfer it to be a Dev site for the current domain and automatically replace it with the click of a button - just as another option.) What's the best way to replace blahblah.com with a completely new blahblah.com if I'm not using any of the old content? There are only about 4 URL'st, such as blahblah.com/contact hat will remain the same - with all content replaced. There are about 100 URL's that will no longer be in use or have any part of them ever used again. Can this be done safely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brickbatmove1 -
Robots.txt advice
Hey Guys, Have you ever seen coding like this in a robots.txt, I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you? user-agent: AhrefsBot User-agent: trovitBot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London
User-agent: Nutch
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: / User-agent: *
Disallow: /WebServices/
Disallow: /*?notfound=
Disallow: /?list=
Noindex: /?*list=
Noindex: /local/
Disallow: /local/
Noindex: /handle/
Disallow: /handle/
Noindex: /Handle/
Disallow: /Handle/
Noindex: /localsites/
Disallow: /localsites/
Noindex: /search/
Disallow: /search/
Noindex: /Search/
Disallow: /Search/
Disallow: ? I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you?
Any pointers?0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Technical Site Questions
When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected? Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Request a 3rd party to change the URL to your site or 302 redirect it?
Hi, My new site design for small hope went live about 3 months ago and I changed the URL structure. I'm kind of new to the SEO game, but I've done quite a bit of research, successfully implemented all the 301s I need and tested them and everything is working fine. But I'm having a little trouble with this propagating through Google et al. Most of the advice is to sit tight and wait but I want to be a little more proactive. So even though the 301s are in place, can I ALSO send emails to our partners and request link changes? Would Google find this suspicious behaviour and penalise us? Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
How important is it to canonicalize mobile URLs to desktop URLs?
I know many SEO's prefer a stylesheet and single URL, but if you use m.domain.com, do you canonicalize to your desktop URLS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0